People take part in the "March For Life" anti-abortion rally on Parliament Hill on Thurday. The Conservatives now have a monopoly on the support of voters for whom having Parliament ban or curtail the access to abortion is a ballot-box issue, writes Chantal Hébert.

On a cold January night at the tail end of the losing 2006 Liberal campaign, Paul Martin travelled to the GTA to issue the dire warning of an impending threat to the fundamental rights of the country’s women and sexual minorities.

In a tone worthy of a coming apocalypse, the Liberal leader told a rally of his supporters that, if elected, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives would turn the clock back on abortion rights and same-sex marriage.

With his party losing ground in the polls and the election looming, a frantic Martin had grabbed the plank of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms with both hands in the last stretch of the campaign, only to hit himself over the head with it.

While there was truth to Martin’s assertion that the Conservatives were no fans of those rights or of the court rulings that had brought them about, nor were many of the veteran Liberal MPs who surrounded the then-prime minister as he cast his party as the champion of the Charter.

Some of them owed their initial Liberal nomination in the late ’80s to the concerted effort of the anti-abortion movement to ensure that as many of its own made it to Parliament for an imminent rewriting of the country’s abortion law.

Prior to the 1988 election — at a time when the Supreme Court had just ruled that the section of the Criminal Code dealing with abortion was unconstitutional — then-Liberal leader John Turner had seen the co-authors of his platform both lose their nomination bids to candidates backed by a well-organized anti-abortion lobby.

Under Jean Chrétien, a solid social conservative contingent within the Liberal caucus had voted against proposals to better protect homosexuals and lesbians from discrimination and hate crimes.

In the months prior to the 2006 election, a government bill that gave same-sex couples the same marriage rights as their heterosexual counterparts had only become law because the support of the NDP and the Bloc Québécois had made up for the dissent of a section of Martin’s caucus.

Five years after Martin’s counterintuitive pro-Charter election road show, a motion put forward by Michael Ignatieff to ensure that the promotion of contraception would be part of the maternal health initiative that the Conservatives had designed for developing countries was defeated with help from the anti-abortion faction of the Liberal leader’s own caucus.

It is against that record — which stands at odds both with the party’s pro-choice pro-same-sex marriage stance and its self-appointed role of keeper of the Charter — that Justin Trudeau has set out to impose a pro-choice party line on all his new candidates.

In the future, Liberal MPs will have to abide by the abortion policy of their party in the same way that they now abide by the Charter of Rights, official bilingualism and the clarity act.

Anyone who believes that parties should walk the walk of their policy talk should welcome the overdue end of decades of Liberal doublespeak on the issue of abortion.

At a time when the NDP — a party that has never lacked for clarity on the issue of a woman’s right to choose to carry a fetus to term — has climbed its way to the federal major leagues, the move, from a strategic perspective, probably does not come a moment too soon for the Liberals.

The change effectively leaves the Conservatives with a monopoly on the support of the voters for whom having Parliament ban or curtail the access to abortion is a ballot-box issue. But that may be the opposite of a blessing.

Trudeau’s announcement this week coincided with the news that Campaign Life is working to have as many of its supporters as possible selected as candidates for the 2015 election. The anti-abortion group is specifically targeting the 30 federal ridings that will be in the mix for the first time next year.

In light of all the energy and all the political capital Harper has spent resisting the efforts of some of his own MPs to reopen the abortion debate, it is a dubious gift that Trudeau has handed his Conservative rival.

Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.